Distorting American History

Dear Karen,

I am not living the life I was raised to live. I was raised to be a housewife, to not work, to have children and stay home. My mother wanted me to go to college so I could get my M.R.S. but, while I did receive and M.R.S. at age eighteen (regrettably), I did not go to college. I hated school. I couldn’t imagine four more years of it, no matter how much I was told that college is better than high school. I hated all subjects except English and Creative Writing. I especially hated history. I must have had pretty good analytical powers as a child because I remember thinking in fourth or fifth grade that I hated history because all the founding fathers were so perfect that they were boring. This must be why I liked English and Creative Writing so much. In those classes, reading novels and short stories, I got to read about fictional people who seemed more real than the real people I read about in my history classes.

All those founding fathers were white. We know which one was supposed to have ridden his horse through the streets at midnight to warn that the British were coming, we know which one built a big mansion in Virginia and invented things, and we know which one chopped down a cherry tree and afterwards had been unable to lie about it. I must have had a novelist’s mind even then because I could not help but wonder what his motivation was in chopping down the cherry tree. I know now that this story is a myth, invented by someone, although I don’t know who, and put in children’s history books to encourage us not to lie. It’s hard to take the lesson seriously when you know, on some innate level, that you are being lied to.

I don’t remember how old I was when I learned that Benjamin Franklin (whom I am related to according to family lore and my mother’s genealogical research) is supposed to have had thirteen illegitimate children, but I remember that suddenly my interest in history was piqued. It’s not that I wanted to run the founding fathers’ names through the muck, but I didn’t mind them being brought down a peg or two. And besides, the truth was interesting. The truth was stories and people I could relate to. The truth was me, my own story, the things I saw and observed, the unhappiness of my mother who tried to sell me the same bill of goods (get married, have children, go to church, obey your husband, this will fulfill you) she’d been sold. With bits of truth accumulating in my store of knowledge, my observations about the world began to make more sense, and it helped me begin the process of believing my own thoughts, and trusting myself. In other words I stopped interpreting the world through the lens I was told to use, and began interpreting it for myself, through my own lens. This doesn’t mean that suddenly life was easy. The more I used my own lens, and learned about the lenses of people I hadn’t grown up around, the more I uncovered lies and bullshit. Out of all this, I became a novelist, and a historical novelist at that.

I appreciate all the people who did go to college, and who pursued and interpreted history from original sources, people who combed through dusty boxes of forgotten documents to uncover what we weren’t told in the history books. I appreciate the WPA interviews with former slaves. I appreciate the narratives of freedmen, and escaped slaves, and American Indians who fought against Custer, or who were sent away from their families to the government schools, and whose mouths were washed out with soap for speaking their native language. I appreciate the stories from the American Japanese who were sent to internment camps. I appreciate the ads placed in black newspapers across the South after the end of the Civil War, ads placed by former slaves seeking information about children and parents and husbands and wives, people they’d been separated from via sales and gambling and forced migration. These are the stories I never heard as a child.

Recently David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times wrote a letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of a book titled Between the World and Me, which is written in the form of a letter to his son. Brooks accuses Coates of “rejecting the American dream,” of distorting American history, and of being excessively realistic. Brooks rejects Coates’ interpretation of his own experience. He even said something along the lines of “maybe I should be quiet and listen,” but of course he didn’t. David Brooks, who is white, apparently knows more about being black than Coates, who is black. Brooks chooses to participate in cultural gas-lighting by denying an experience that he has not personally had.

Brooks went so far as to tell Coates that his focus on what it’s like to be black in America “traps generations in the past and destroys the guiding star that points to a better future.” Setting aside the fact that Coates is responsible as a father in giving his son some guidance in how to stay alive, and information about the world he lives in, all I can say is Wow. One black man’s voice, telling his truth is responsible for trapping generations. It wouldn’t have anything to do with systematic racism. It’s someone telling their truth that’s doing this. Brooks is correct that American history is being distorted, but not by Coates.

I didn’t become deeply interested in history until I started writing fiction and doing research into the eras I was writing about. I began unearthing all kinds of stuff I was unaware of. While writing Life Without Water, I read memoirs by Vietnam Veterans, and interviews and studied the policy of war. While writing Home Across the Road I read everything I could about black America and by black writers. While writing The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson I read about slavery in the deep south, the fall of New Orleans, and the Comanche Indians. My goal in doing all this reading is to absorb it, not to argue with it.

I’m a better person for this. I’m not perfect, and there is a lot to learn, but I’m a better person, a more open person, than I would be had I followed the sheltered path that was set for me. I’m glad that this is what I do with my talent. I’m glad that I’m a fiction writer and that my goal is always, as much as is possible, to listen to my characters who are not me, and to walk in their shoes and tell their stories as well as I can. I’m sorry that some writers feel compelled to argue with other writers about their own experiences. I wish for all of us a little silence in which to hear each other, and stillness in which to feel the millions of silenced voices clamoring to tell their stories. And I wish for all of us, the wisdom to not be so destructive, to slow down, to listen. For those struggling to trust their own voices, I wish for you to find safe places for that exploration. They do exist, but you most likely will not find them in the gathering places of the loud.

Love, Nancy